The Bright Side Of Suffering
by Chiiharu
Summary: So now you will know exactly what it feels like to be an obstacle in my way. I know more than you think. You mean the world to me, so hold your serpent tongue. Is a whore's lies worth dying for? Heh. I'll just take my time.


**A/N:** Well, yeah. So this is the sequel to 'Adalia', the very story that I've been slaving over for the past couple of days, you know. So, the idea of this fic came from a conversation I was having with KO. I told her I wanted to write a fic about... well, torture, and she encouraged me to do it. XD So, naturally, this is my first 'torture-fic'. This is dark and angsty, so, yeah. There's a reason why this is rated M, people! So cheese to KO, cause I had fun twisting this story! And for my first torture-fic, this came out pretty nice for me. XD

And this goes out to my auntie Matillda, because she gave me a list of pairings to write one-shots to. And I think she'll like this one. You better like this one, old-lady! D:

And everyone! Give a big shout-out to my dad! I love you daddy dearest! Because... believe it or not, but he gave me pointers, and looked over this for typos. I asked him to give me a decent beta, but he's lazy. XD He did what he could. Poor guy.

Also, I'm getting cash money for this. Fifty-bucks, comprende? XD Today was a good day.

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**-: The Bright Side Of Suffering :- **

_If there's a bright side to this suffering, can you help me see? It's getting harder to believe. _

_You always said that this would not last long, but it's gone on and on and on and I just can't make it stop._

_Hey, is your heart still beating? I can't stop the bleeding. I've lost you completely._

People are afraid of themselves, of their own reality; their feelings most of all. People talk about how great love is, but that's bullshit. Love hurts. Feelings are fucking _disturbing. _People are taught that pain is evil and dangerous. How can they deal with love if they're afraid to feel? Pain is meant to wake us up. People try to hide their pain. But they're wrong. Pain is something to carry, like a radio. You feel your strength in the experience of pain. It's all in how you carry it. That's what matters. Pain is a feeling.

It was strange. I thought I had died for sure. Kicked the bucket. Left this world with Issaru. No—I didn't _think_ I was dead. I _knew _I was dead. I had even heard the others—calling for me. But they were all just fucking useless. I thought, I'm free now. I don't have to put up with any of their bullshit. I didn't have to be Aysel lackey or Renata's 'best friend'. I didn't have to follow some spineless psycho around run petty errands for that bitch of a leader. I was truly, truly happy, and I could do whatever the hell I wanted with Issaru now. I only hoped that he was in his right mind.

Beyond doubt, my body was mentally aching with pain. I wanted seeing him to be real. I wanted to see him one last time. Him. Smiling at me. Imagine my surprise when he fucking flipped out on me. It not only drained me physically, but mentally as well. But the worse part was over now. I was away from everything I had ever hated in my life. I was here. I was free. But then it clicked. Where the hell was here? Where was I? That was when I heard the beating of my damned artificial heart—pounding harmoniously in my chest. I sought to think that it was just one of the ironic perks of dying—being able to hear your fucking retched heart beating.

I craved to think that Issaru was next to me, wearing that bright smile that I had grown to yearn for. I would have given anything to see his calm, vivacious face again. But reality was that fate was not going to let me have that. Fate was a bitch. I really thought that things couldn't have gotten any worse for me. Me—dying—no—me dead—sounded so surreal. I never imaged I'd spend my dying moments lying in a puddle of my former lover's blood. Nor did I ever imagine him lying in that same puddle of blood with me. And I really never pondered the thought of killing myself.

I was use to being in control. Winning. I hadn't heard my name and 'losing' in the same sentence before. Some words to describe me? Crazy. Cold. Stuck-up. Standoffish. Aloof. Afraid. Lacking in social skills. Bizarre. Unable to connect. Incapable of love. Freak. Sad. Lonely. Selfish. Secretive. Ungrateful. Unfriendly. Sadistic. Serial killer. It wasn't that hard. I was more-or-less feared in Aysel. Feared by every fucking one of them, regardless of what anyone had to say. And I was going to miss that fear. I was going to sincerely miss all of that. I was going to miss Aysel's fucking bantering, Renata's bitching, Naira and Defina's prissiness—and even that brat… Sayuri and her gang. Hell, I might have even missed walking around with that idiot Zed.

Just the fact that none of those people had a reason to fear me—or bother me—was both heartbreaking and blissful. I wanted to open both of my eyes again. I wanted to finally look through both of my green corneas. To see the next sky with both of my eyes was a dream. And it wouldn't hurt to have had my real arm clinging to my shoulder blade again. Most of all, I wanted to be filled with real internal organs inside of my body—instead of artificial ones. I felt more-or-less fake with all of those materialistic things just bouncing around inside me. …Like a toy that someone changed and played with for hours-on-end. I wasn't Lucrecia anymore. I was some thing that someone strived to keep alive.

My whole existence was dedicated to living on artificial scrap metal… and killing. Air filled my lungs as I inhaled an intake of breath. The smell of bitter orange, cinnamon, vanilla, woods, solar notes, and musk attacked my sense of smell. It was calming—air filling throughout my lungs. The temperature around me was somewhat cold, and I felt a tad weak. It was strange… I didn't know where I was, exactly. But I guess that was what happened when you died. I tried to open my eyes—both of them—but I only managed to open the one I had grown to rely on. Y'know, that hurt. That fucking hurt. To believe something… and just have it taken away from you in an instant was complete bullshit.

I started to think that maybe you took your old body with you to the after life. I was certain that I was dead; there were no arguments with that. Breathing became something of a chore for me. I was in a state of shock—the shock of knowing that I was dead… with a beating heart. It didn't really make a lot of sense. The symptoms of death were easy. Signs of death, or strong indications that a person was no longer alive were: Pallor mortis, paleness which happens almost instantaneously (in the 15–120 minutes after the death). Algor mortis, the reduction in body temperature following death. This is generally a steady decline until matching ambient temperature. Rigor mortis, the limbs of the corpse become stiff (Latin rigor) and difficult to move or manipulate. Livor mortis, a settling of the blood in the lower (dependent) portion of the body. Decomposition, the reduction into simpler forms of matter. And last but not least, ceasing respiration, the body no longer metabolizes. As a scientist, I worked with death all the time.

One of the challenges in defining death, for me, was in distinguishing it from life. Death would seem to refer to either the moment at which life ended, or when the state that followed life began. However, determining when death had occurred required drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death. This was problematic however, because there was little consensus over how to define life. Some had suggested defining life in terms of consciousness. When consciousness ceases, a living organism can be said to have died. One of the notable flaws in that approach was that there were many organisms which were alive but probably _not _conscious. Another problem with that approach was in defining consciousness, which remained a mystery to many of Aysels' scientists, psychologists and philosophers. This general problem of defining death applied to the particular challenge of defining death in the context of medicine.

…It was the loneliest feeling in the world—to find yourself standing up when everyone else was sitting down. To have everybody look at you and say "What's the matter with her?" I knew what it felt like. Walking down an empty street, listening to the sound of your own footsteps. Shutters closed, blinds drawn, doors locked against you. And you aren't sure whether you're walking toward something, or if you're just walking away. I know it seemed like I was this strong person who could get though anything, but inside I was fragile. I had so many things thrown at me, and each one had only made me crack. What I was afraid of was shattering. People were always telling me to smile, like fucking smiling was going to just take away all the hurt and pain. Well, I'd tried that. I tried hiding my sorrows and covering the sadness in smiles and whatnot. It doesn't help. That's bullshit.

Although some tiny part of me retained a dim sense of the more functioning person I once was—like a room with a closed door that was never entered anymore—it became increasingly difficult to envision myself ever inhabiting that version of myself again. There had been too many recurrent episodes, too many years of trying to fight off that debilitating demon of a thing. It had been called by different names at different times in history—melancholia, malaise, cafard, brown study, the blues, the black dog, acedia—and had been treated as a spiritual malady, a failure of will, a biochemical malfunctioning, a psychic conundrum, sometimes all at once. Whatever it was, it had come to fucking define me, filling out all the available space, leaving no possibility of a "before" or an "after." Instead I harbored the hallucinatory conviction that I had stayed around the scene of my own life too long—that I was, in some unyielding sense, ex post facto.

The real question was why no one ever seemed to figure this grim scenario out on their own, just by looking at me. This was enraging in and of itself—the fact that severe depression, much as it might have been treated as an illness, didn't send out clear signals for others to pick up on; it did its deadly dismantling work under cover of normalcy. The psychological pain was agonizing, but there was no way of proving it, no bleeding wounds to point to. How much simpler it would be all around if I could put my mind in a cast, like a broken ankle, and elicit murmurings of damn sympathy from other people instead of skepticism... and in some cases outright hostility. Though hostility was_ really rare_. Finally life became a variety specific thing—and that was what I was. Ultimately, looking back, I was beginning to believe that I needed to always be fucked up. I needed to always have some reason to hate myself, something to make me feel eternally incomplete.

Choking with dry tears and raging, raging, raging at the absolute indifference of nature and the world to the death of love, the death of hope and the death of beauty, I remember sitting on the end of my bed, collecting these pills and capsules together and wondering why—why when I felt I had so much to offer, so much love, such outpourings of love and energy to spend on the world—I was incapable of being offered love, giving it or summoning the energy with which I knew I could transform myself and everything around me. I now thought of depression as pain. It was a kind of living death, a non-feeling that was its own sort of agony. The problem was, I always knew exactly how dead I was, how my mind had shut down. There was still this consciousness of what I was losing. That was the real hell of it.

There was much pain that was quite noiseless; and vibrations that made my agonies were often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There were glances of hatred that stabbed and raised no cry of murder; robberies that left me forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that had marred a life had been breathed into no human ear. Added to the loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath my eyes or the way I would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake my head as though I was disagreeing with life. Grief made me wander.

I had seen the results of that ultimately humane treatment, the frontal lobotomy. For this, I removed a chunk of skull in the forehead area, stuck an instrument not unlike an ice pick down to the brain where, with a few curt brushes, I scraped away all grief, all rage, all violence, all the things that made us Enlightened Ones, leaving one great hulk of lonely smiling protoplasm.

Sometimes, I was just angry. I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly, I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then, I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains.

The murder existed like a stone inside of me that I wouldn't be free of, until I hoisted it out by killing. I was not afraid… as much as I was disturbingly calm. I knew it wouldn't be hard for me.

I knew that if I still couldn't open both of my eyes, I still had my damned mechanical arm. I wanted to see what I had looked like, even though I had died. I gazed into the shiny, reflective metal that was my arm, and what I saw scared me. My hair was taken out of my pony-tail and cut. It was long and wavy—thick bangs at the font of my head and at the sides were flicked outwards. The bangs swept across the front of my forehead. It was such a nice, long haircut. The sides were cut shorter… as if they had been layered. My hair color was different now, too. It was now dark brown with lighter highlights, apposed to being a bright auburn. One of my bangs laid on top of my inactive eye, so that didn't really bother me. Maybe… I did die after all. If my hair was so well taken care of, I longed to see what I was wearing. I looked down at my body, which was clothed in a black cocktail dress—tight fitting, shirred ruffle trim, open back—three horizontal straps. It also had a two-tiered mini-flounce hemline with cascading fuddles. I felt light headed as I scanned my surroundings. I brought my gaze to a nice, candle-lit room.

Sometimes, I came to hate people because they couldn't see where I was. I had gone empty, completely empty and all they saw was the visual form; my arms and legs, my face, my height and posture, the sounds that came from my throat. But I was fucking empty. The person I was just a second ago no longer existed; drifting, spinning slowly into the ether somewhere way back there. I was a Xerox of my former self. I couldn't abstract my own dying any longer. I was a stranger to others and to myself and I refused to pretend that I was familiar or that I had history attached to my heels. I was a glass, clear empty glass.

I slowly sat up from the ground, trying to make sense of where I was. I hadn't seen Issaru, so that was both relief, and sorrow for me. I adjusted my glasses with the mere push of an index-finger. A part of me wanted to get up and walk. …But I was afraid out of my mind to find out where I was.

What was depression, really? Was there one concrete definition, or had the meaning loosened as our generation had continued its downhill descent? To me, depression was simply my life. I was not suicidal. I didn't hate the world. I didn't dress completely in black. I was just sad. I had been sad for what felt like my entire life, but that was not true. I was happy once and I could vaguely remember what it felt like, but I couldn't touch it. I couldn't get that happiness back. I didn't know how. That's what depression was to me, knowing what happiness was, but never being able to touch it, to feel it. It was like sawdust, the unhappiness: it infiltrated everything, everything was a problem, everything made me fucking angry.

I missed all the little things. Like the way we'd share a big gooey ice-cream. But I especially missed the hot nights in those motel rooms when he was all around me, the taste, and the scent and the feel of him. And I'd fall asleep in his arms, with the sound of his heartbeat being the last thing I heard before going to sleep. I ached with longing.

"…Am I mad at you?" I managed to say, almost in an incoherent mummer. "That's your main concern after shattering my whole world? Mad for what? Breaking my heart? Maybe for letting me put all my trust in you... only to be betrayed? Am I mad at you? ... No. More like crushed... did I ever really know you?" I paused, not wanting to go into a spiraling fit of rage. No, that wasn't me. But even in the afterlife, I still couldn't fucking forget Issaru. I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mending whole was good as new. What was broken was broken—and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best then mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. This time it was over. I was going to keep my heart, I was going to be strong and not fall apart. It would get better. I'd no longer cry in a couple of weeks. I wouldn't want to die because I was already dead. I wouldn't want to go back to my old life. I'd be able to sleep, and it wouldn't hurt so bad.

"My, my, what a sweet sentiment," a smarmy voice cooed. It was almost like it was familiar. My skin literally crawled at who the voice belonged to. No, it wasn't Issaru. But it was damn near _infuriating_ to hear. I narrowed my eyes as I stood up, sneering a hell of a lot. Did I even dare to turn around? I felt someone's presence, sure, but was it the presence I wanted to see? It was hard to accept it, but I couldn't change the past. I couldn't go back and manipulate the things I wanted to the way I always wanted them to be. Because life would have been meaningless and boring and just not worth living. I was just so tired of all these sudden changes. I didn't want anymore surprises. So, I calmly turned around and closed my eye. I inhaled heavily. I wanted to be calm. I really did. But sometimes, some bastards just don't deserve even that.

"What. The. Fuck," I said, snarling. "…This isn't a dream. I don't think I'm hallucinating anymore. As a matter of fact, I think I'm fairly dead right now. So," I paused folding my arms. "Don't tell me you died, too, Zed." I ended, turning around, unconsciously. Zed laughed, motioning behind him. Every muscle must have tensed up in my body. I was the old me again. Old, _bitchy _Lucrecia. You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself? All of my emotions were replaced with pure rage. Hate. Rage again. I hadn't taken out my anger on someone for so long. I just exploded.

All of a sudden, I felt like an emotional paraplegic. I felt like all of my gains and insights were based on control and denial. I was worried that I was so profoundly sick as to appear healthy and together. Pain was strange. A cat killing a bird, a car accident, a fire... Pain arrived, and there it was, it sat on me. It was real. And to anybody watching, I looked foolish. Like I suddenly became an idiot. There was no cure for it unless I knew somebody who understood how I felt, and knew how to help. Answers to why Zed was here quickly came to my mind. And you know what? I didn't like any fucking one of them.

"I will gladly answer you're questions, Lucrecia. My, you look like you were having a real hallucination, weren't you, Doctor? Those drugs I gave you to nullify the use of your focal really worked, didn't they?"

My calm demeanor snapped. Completely. So he meant to tell me that I was not dead, Issaru didn't come back, and I was still in Aysel with _him_? And he fucking drugged me? At that moment, I was just thinking about how much I wanted my life to be boring. I wanted to die. I wanted to be free of seeing this bastard. Normally I did not like to think about my death. I would rather think about other's deaths.

"Why the fuck did you do that?!" I screamed in rage.

It seemed a strange and repugnant conclusion that with the cessation of consciousness at death, there ceased to be any knowledge of having existed. And then the consciousness—what was it during the time that it continued? And what became of it when it ended? I could only infer that it was a specialized and individualized form of that Infinite and Eternal Energy which transcended both my knowledge and my imagination. With rage fuelling my movements, I started to walk calmly towards Zed, only to be flung into the wall.

His face didn't give me any emotion; if I hadn't known him so well, I would have been lead to believe that this bastard was really going to kill me. And _that _sounded so surreal. Not being able to breath was different from _actual_ breathing. It left me feeling like a shadow. Like I wasn't Lucrecia anymore, but some puppet gasping for some sort of oxygen. This pain didn't worry me at all. I had felt things far worse than this. Instinctively, my mechanically arm tried to gain-say the grip he had on my neck. I really needed to breath. I thought I was going to collapse without some sort of air filling my lungs. He became blurry in my eye. Everything was starting to slowly slip away from me. My sense of smell, my vision, my facility to feel. I gritted my teeth. I hated the fact that he had this much control over me, and I was utterly powerless to stop his rein. But still, the battle of power between us kept going. His grip loosened, but not all at once. His cold, sinister eyes were just staring into my own as I tried to form words. But nothing came out of my mouth. Not even sound.

My tongue moved, but I needed air. Abruptly, the bastard let go of me, and I buckled onto the ground. My legs gave out on me as I tried to breathe for air. No way was this bastard actually trying to hurt me. Noticing that I just couldn't be beaten by this spineless bitch, I quickly scrambled up to my feet, coughing a little. I was really going to kill this fucker. But before I could say anything, I was thrust up against the wall once more, with his hand tightly around my neck. With my active eye barely able to see him, he bit into my neck with an inhumane clench. I immediately flinched under him, trying with all of my might to get him off of me. But his body was so heavy. I slightly gasped in pain as I closed my eye and bit my lip to keep from screaming. Blood started to trickle down the wound in my neck as I frantically called his name, both my mechanical arm and my flesh arm trying to push him away from me. But I guess this sick bastard only found that amusing as he dug his thumb into the wound on my neck, stretching the rest of his fingers across my throat.

I didn't think I'd ever be able to breath again, but like hell I was going to scream. For this bastard? Why bother? He started to twist his thumb inside of my wound, making my body ripple in pain. I think I collapsed again, but his hand on my neck was the only thing keeping me from falling.

"It is human," he said, content and vicious sounding at the same time. "We all have the jungle inside of us. We all have wants, needs, and desires… strange as they may seem. If you stop to think about it, we are both pretty creative, cooking up all these fantasies. It is like a kind of poetry, is it not, Doctor—?"

"Fucker," I spat. "I'm not cooking anything with you," I paused, flashing a toothy, intimidating sneer. "You better hope to whatever god you worship that you kill me." I let out a chuckle. "You better hope you paralyze me, or cripple me someway, because when I get my abilities back, I'm going to kill the_ fuck_ out of you." It was difficult to look into this bastards eyes and _not_ want to kill him. But I couldn't do anything about it. I seethed. I had to be honest with myself. This bastard wasn't as stupid as he let on. He was smart, taking my weapon away from me—and anything I could have turned into a weapon. It was admiral, that he remembered his place. That was, in all probability, the reason why my hair and clothes had been changed. I couldn't help but let out a sinister snigger. I could make great inferences… it was one of the perks of being in the profession I was in. This went beyond wanting to kill this bastard. He made me think I was dead, for fuck's sake. He gave me false hope, and he still wouldn't answer me. I couldn't figure out what the hell would have driven him to do something like this, but like I said, he was going to kick the fucking bucket.

"I am glad you agree with me, Lucrecia. I had never really stopped to get a good look at you, but you are—to a certain extent—attractive." I snorted, even through all this pain. Who did he think he was? I didn't agree with any fucking thing that came out of his mouth. "But anyway, this is what it feels like to get violated. What you are feeling now. It is awful, is it not? I mean, it makes you feel so _powerless." _

"… That would sound _so_—fucking intimidating—if I actually believed you had a spine," I spat. "The only reason you're parading this shit is solely because I can't do anything. You made sure of that, didn't you?" I paused, my mechanically arm twitching. The only person that had any knowledge of how that piece of metal worked was the only who constructed it. Issaru… "What if I told you missed something, Zed?"

Silence.

Fucking silence.

The silence was doing nothing but irritating me. Why? Why did I feel so _gone_? I was now so distant that I just didn't feel right. Now I was ripped away from existence. I had become so transparent that I lost all matter. I was standing nowhere, breathing fucking fake air. Unpredictably, I heard footsteps, which had to mean he was walking. _Away_ from me. But reality was that I wanted him to make a dumb-ass mistake. To make himself vulnerable to my—_eventual_ backlash. I wasn't fully powerless—that I knew. But I wanted to make him think he had control. Because that way, my revenge would be more palpable. "I was hoping to have been more… gentle with you, Doctor." My eye quickly shot up to see him wielding some sort of rusted sword in one hand, and a black, heart-shaped bottle in the other. I sighed, arrogance tainted in my voice. Was that the best thing he could come up with? How _wasn't_ it obvious that pain was—not a real concern of mine? My eye, my arm, hell, my whole body was just a living representation of a desolate battle-ground. "I see you are not dejected yet, Doctor. Maybe this will change that, hmm?" he paused, raising the blade up to my shoulder. I was trying to lean up against the wall to stop from falling. "Let's sing… Lucrecia."

I tilted my head as best as I could. "You're fucking insane."

"'A' is for Aggressive," Zed murmured, his gaze fixated on the sword. "…Which the Doctor has always been!" His last couple of words were angry, which was why he growled in rage. The sword sank into my shoulder, sending my blood spraying across the room. I hissed in pain, staggering—struggling to keep a game-face. My lips slightly parted. I wanted to say something—anything—but I knew that no words would have came out of my mouth. I would have, most likely, screamed. The pain was _that _agonizing. The rust on the sword only made it worse. My dress was drenched in blood. "I did not hear you, Lucrecia." My gaze drifted to the floor, but then a fiery thirst for revenge lead me to look back up at this bastard.

"How does it feel…? To know I'm your liberation?" I spat. "You're fucking pathetic."

"Mmm'kay. 'B' is for Bludgeon, which will go on if the Doctor keeps opening her snide mouth!" At first, he raised the sword up to my mouth, thinking that I would have had a panic attack or some shit. I didn't even flinch. He laughed in—a sinister way at my seditious action. Without warning, he quickly lashed out at my stomach, making me scream in pain. Blood started to drip onto the floor as I squinted my eye. It was excruciating. It seemed like it was a long lash, because my whole abdomen was blaring in pain. His brown eyes lit up in ecstasy as my body started to involuntarily twitch—violently. I wanted to fall, but something was restraining me from doing so. I think he was using his fucking focal as well.

"Do I even have to tell you what's next, Doctor? A 'C'—for Cripple… which you asked me to do to you…" I was in so much pain, that I didn't even know what it was… exactly… that he had cut on me. I thought it was my arm. I began to let out petite, short-lived breaths. Sweat started to build up on my forehead. I didn't know how much more of this I could have taken. "'D' stands for Disoriented, doesn't it, Doctor? Because I know I am." I guess a couple of seconds of silence passed before I felt a searing pain serge throughout my flesh-arm. My screaming tore through the solid silence, my glasses tumbling towards the floor. A fanatic-grin plastered under his emotionless eyes.

"And everyone should know what 'E' stands for, right, Doctor? Exceed—because I know I am inflicting pain higher than your standards of it!" My body was physically prepared for another jolt of pain, but I flinched at the sound of the sword being dropped on the ground. He gripped his black bottle with both of his bloodstained gloved-hands. The smell of bitter orange, cinnamon, vanilla, woods, solar notes, and musk attacked my sense of smell again. But this time it was stronger. "How does it feel to know I'm your liberation, Doctor?" I tensed up yet again.

"Fuck no," I curtly responded, coughing a bit. My whole body felt weak. Zed shrugged, as if my comment meant nothing to him.

"Poor Lucrecia," he cooed. "'F' stands for Fire, because this is going to sting." I couldn't breath for five good minutes. He poured the bottle of perfume on top of my head, and I was just thanking my luck that most of it had ran into my closed eye. It took my mind a while to process it, but perfume oil was necessarily diluted with a solvent because undiluted oils (natural or synthetic) contained high concentrations of chemical components (natural or otherwise) that would have likely resulted in allergic reactions and possibly injury when applied directly to skin or clothing. I had _open_ wounds. _Now _I was panicking. The first wound the liquid hit was my neck wound, and—I swear to whatever being was watching over me that day—the pain was enough to bring tears to my eyes, along with a loud, shrill scream escaping my mouth. Most of my dress soaked up the oil, but some of it still managed to get inside the flesh wound on my stomach. I was bleeding profusely, a puddle of blood collecting under my feet.

He started to hum. "'G' is for Gregarious, which I really want to be, honestly, Doctor," Zed paused, probably hoping for some sort of answer, but truthfully, I had no energy left in my body to even form words. Truth be told, I was somewhat disconcerted. Slowly, he grabbed my flesh-hand, touching my fingers. My body was slow to produce a reaction—until I heard an ear-shattering, disturbing crack of my index-finger. My hand felt numb, but that terrifying crack sounded deathly. I knew that when I got all feeling back into my hand, I was going to feel the pain. And it would have been intense. "You know what I've just learned, Lucrecia? 'H' stands for Haughty, which you aren't acting anymore." He was right. I didn't have enough power for that either. He went to the next finger, bending it and twisting it until he heard that nauseous cracking noise he longed to hear. Now I was in a state of apathy, my eye dropping with fatigue. I was beyond tears, beyond screams and whimpers. I felt my lungs being stabbed from the inside. I felt my stomach being churned and shredded into nothing more than pudding. I felt him rip into everything I was; I felt my whole body tearing in two.

"Did you know, Doctor? That 'I' stands for Ignorance? Because you could make all of this stop." Trick question. Was I going to just slander my fucking name? … I thought I could have taken this pain, but I was breaking, fast. I wanted… my body wanted to plead with him. But my mind wasn't going to let that happen. He waited a couple of seconds before he grabbed the remainder of my fingers. "'J' stands for Jaded, because I am getting bored with hurting you." I found that hard to believe. But at this point, I really didn't have anything to believe in. He let go of my hands and picked up the sword again, pondering what his next move would have been. My breath was literally taken from me as he impaled it into my chest, blood spewing from my mouth. He left it in there, too, leaving me to deal with the pain of a rusted sword inside of my body.

"'K' stands for Kairomone, because I forgot why I wasted my time with you," he seethed, as if the sight of seeing my body disgusted him. His lips and tongue seared a line down my throat, and I felt his teeth against my collarbone. I winced in pain, to tired to form words. I felt life slipping away from me. In reality, I was slowly losing my mind. Underneath the guise of my tired smirk, gradually I was dying inside.

"Be grateful I did not kill you… all I did was destroy you," he said in a saccharine voice. "Because 'L' stands for Lucrecia, the person I love."

* * *

_This time you took it way too far. I'm sick and tired inside. I'm black and I am hollow. _

_I'm trying to find what's missing from my life. And now the tables have turned. This pain is only temporary._

-- "The Bright Side Of Suffering" -- Scary Kids Scaring Kids


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